Worldwide, the volatile - and often violent
- combination of a religious state with religious politics is on the rise. Of the
alternatives, the authors find the secular state with religious politics most promising.
But it is increasingly rare.

Jay Demerath, professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is co-author
of A Bridging of Faiths (Princeton University Press, 1992). He presented a
reduced version of this paper on May 20, 1996, at the Institute of Oriental Philosophy in
Tokyo as part of the spring lecture and dialogue series cosponsored by the Boston Research
Center on Religion and Transnational Civil Society in the 21st Century.

Karen Straight is completing her Ph.D. in sociology at the
University of Massachusetts; her dissertation involves a multinational analysis of women
in politics.

******

Twenty years ago, most social scientists tended to see
religion as a vestige of a bygone age, an increasingly irrelevant remnant from a prior
epoch of superstition and miseducation. But about 1979 things began to change.
Astonishingly enough, religion took on a new political importance as phrases like
"liberation theology," "fundamentalism," "solidarity," and
"moral majority" were shouted from the political ramparts in countries as
diverse as Nicaragua, Iran, Poland, and the United States. Suddenly the topic of religion
and politics was less boring, and like the scholar whose scoffed-at laboratory work finds
an indispensable application, we found people actually cared. But, of course, we had not
been alone in chronicling religion's new political urgency. In the last several years,
several other scholars have written important works that deal with religion and politics
in different countries. We commend especially the recent works of Martin Riesebrodt
(1990), Mark Juergensmeyer (1993), Jose Casanova (1994), Lester Kurtz (1995) and the
magisterial five volumes on fundamentalisms edited by Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby
(1991-95).

Meanwhile, over the last ten years or so, in search of key
sources of violence, vacuity, vulnerability, and vitality, Demerath has been examining the
present and tending relations between religion, politics, and the state in some fifteen
countries around the world. He has visited Guatemala and Brazil in Latin America, Northern
Ireland, Poland, and Sweden in Europe, Egypt, Israel, and Turkey in the Middle East,
Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and Thailand in South Asia, and China and Japan in the Far
East. Of course, our own country, the United States, always lurks in the background as a
comparative anchor point. Moreover, the project spans various forms of Christianity,
Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as political systems that range between dynamic
democracies and strict one-party states.

One common finding within this variety involves the very different
relations between religion and politics, on the one hand, and religion and the state, on
the other. Few will be surprised to learn that campaigning politicians everywhere tend to
invoke local religious themes and symbols as sources of legitimacy and what Demerath and
Rhys Williams have called "cultural power" (1992). What may be more surprising
is the frequent tendency for governmental regimes and their officials to try to keep
religion at arm's length. While religion is often an ally in the pursuit of power, once
power has been secured, religion can become an unwelcome constraint in the quite different
processes of state administration.

Demerath developed this point in an earlier article (1991), arguing
that, while few countries have the kind of formal, legal "separation of church and
state" that characterizes the U.S., an informal de facto separation is almost a
commonplace. The most conspicuous exceptions here are not "religious states" but
rather "state religions" in which the government seeks to control religion.
Strangely enough, this often involves state support for religion in an effort to coopt and
nullify it as an independent power-base.

Here we want to continue in a similar vein but with somewhat wider
scope. Specifically, we want to sketch four types of situation implied at the intersection
of two basic distinctions, one between the religious and the secular (ambiguously
straddling the nonreligious and the religiously neutral, as we shall see), and the other
between politics and the state. Thus, one can imagine religious politics with a religious
state; secular politics and a secular state; secular politics and a religious state, and
finally religious politics with a secular state.

We shall comment on each of these four combinations momentarily. But a
few preliminary cautions are in order. First, typologies for their own sake and in their
own terms can be stultifying as mere scholastic exercises. However, each of the four
combinations here has empirical standing, and the differences between them amount to more
than a conceptual conceit. In many situations, life itself hangs in the balance, since
levels of religiously implicated violence vary greatly among the types in question.
Second, these distinctions are not as clear as the bold dichotomy suggests. For present
purposes, the "religiousness" of a government or a political party is more a
matter of consensual perception than formal acknowledgment or even legal documentation. In
virtually every country, as we shall see, one can identify tendencies towards combinations
other than the one assigned. Then too, every state administration involves some degree of
politics as well; politics only become religious in response to broader religious tensions
within the society at large; and the distinction between religion and the secular is
itself artificial, especially if religion is defined more sociologically than
theologically in terms of the sacred. Third, although each of these types deserves
detailed exploration, we shall devote disproportionate attention to the last combination
of a secular state with religious politics. If it is not a panacea, it at least offers
hope in an area too often suffused with hopelessness.

Religious States and Religious Politics From both a simple conceptual point of view and a simplistic historical
perspective, this would appear the purest of the four cases, and perhaps the most common
stereotype of non-Western, hence nonsecular, societies around the world. Because religion
in one sphere is matched symmetrically by religion in the other, a religious state would
seem to go hand in hand with religious politics.

In fact, the combination is more the exception than the rule, and this
is because it is so volatile and potentially violent. When a religious state is faced with
religious politics, there is a religious conflict at issue. Under such circumstances, the
state's very legitimacy is called into question, and violence may reflect preemptive
actions of state control as well as the clash among contending religious parties. If there
is a single pattern that lends itself to the most widespread religious and cultural
violence, it is surely this one. And, alas, while the category is rare, it is hardly
nonexistent.

Within our "sample" of countries, several cases invite
inclusion here - at least at various points in their histories. Like most other Latin
American countries, both Brazil and Guatemala were once officially Catholic states in a
religious political system that involved the subjugation and suppression of indigenous
religious alternatives. Formally, both countries had severed these state religious ties by
the end of the nineteenth century; informally, ties have persisted in varying forms. In
Brazil, the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy is now seeking to reappropriate and
renegotiate its seat at the right hand of the state, while at the same time both church
and state are engaged in a new religious politics animated by persistent strains of
liberation theology on the one hand and a surging pentecostal Protestantism on the other.
In Guatemala, the dominant military state has shifted its ostensible religious affiliation
from Catholic to Protestant in the last decade, and there is no question that its ongoing
guerilla opposition is in part a movement of Mayan religious revitalization.

Or consider the case of Israel. Many Israelis would protest its
categorization as a religious state, arguing that Zionism itself can be seen as a secular
movement, and that the state makes ample provision for both secular practices and various
non-Judaic faiths, especially Islamic and Christian. At the same time, there is no
question that the Israeli state is perceived as Jewish by most Jews and non-Jews alike.
Even if this were not the case, Zionism itself may be a sufficiently sacred commitment to
qualify as religious in its own terms. Certainly there is no question that Israeli
politics often take religious forms. This not only applies to the participation of Muslim
Palestinians, including the Hamas, but also to the struggles among various Jewish groups -
whether secularists on the left or contesting movements on the right, such as the Gush
Emunim and the ultra-orthodox Haredi. As Yitzhak Rabin's assassination makes clear, the
stakes are large and the rates of violence are correspondingly high.

But perhaps the clearest combination of a religious state with religious
politics is found in Northern Ireland. There is no question that the state is perceived in
Protestant terms, whether de jure as a result of its inclusion within Anglican Britain, or
de facto because of the three-hundred-year political dominance of local Protestants.
Certainly there is no doubt that politics are riven with religion - at least insofar as
they have involved extreme civil religious blocs that are "culturally" if not
always "religiously" Protestant and Catholic respectively. The recent truce and
possible signs of a negotiated settlement signal a change in the religious politics, but
by no means its end. What was once a small Catholic minority may well become an effective
political majority early in the next century, and Catholics have already begun to make
gains through the ballot rather than the bullets of the IRA. Such a development is
hastened by the increased out-migration of Protestants with resources, who read the new
writing on the graffiti-emblazoned walls; it is compounded by the frustrations of those
less advantaged Protestants remaining behind.

As all of the above examples attest, the combination of a religious
state and religious politics has occasioned some of the most deeply rooted and tragic
violence of the modern era. This makes it especially important to consider the
alternatives, even though it is one thing to point out the dangers of this combination in
the abstract and quite another to prevent countries from sliding towards it in reality.
Then too, some of the alternatives have warts of their own.

Secular States and Secular Politics

If the first combination is stereotypically non-Western, this one is
commonly associated with the West. In one sense, it represents a realization of the
Enlightenment vision through what Bryan Wilson (1966) called the "secularization of
public religion" and what Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone (1994) call the
"de-sacralization of the state." However much these authors are thought to
disagree on other matters, they are in basic concurrence here.

There is no question that the secular-state secular-politics combination
is often associated with Western Europe in particular. Despite the continued existence of
"Christian" Democratic parties in Germany and France, both countries fall into
this category, as does Italy in the wake of its recent revocation of its long-standing
concordat with the Vatican.

Much the same is true if one looks functionally rather than formally at
Anglican England or Lutheran Scandinavia. In fact, there are active movements on behalf of
religious disestablishment in all of these symbolically religious nations. In part, these
are efforts to revitalize religion as an autonomous political force, since many church
folk now regard the relationship as inhibiting their prophetic roles. Indeed, the
establishments that survive are often defended principally on nonreligious grounds. In
Sweden, the church has functioned somewhat like an unofficial census bureau and is
subvented for the purpose. However, Sweden has recently voted to dis-establish religion by
the year 2000. Many politicians see these establishments as cases of the
sublime-gone-ridiculous and the purely symbolic source of vestigial charm and occasional
humor.

Although Europe does not exhaust the secular-secular category, its
influence is apparent in two additional cases: Turkey and China. Turkey had been tilting
toward the West throughout the latter days of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth
century, where there was a special fascination with the secular theology of French
positivism. In a sense, Kemal Ataturk both had and ate the Ottoman cake when he seized
power in 1921 and carried through one of the most far-reaching and enduring
politico-cultural revolutions in the twentieth century. Ataturk was familiar with
sociologist Emile Durkheim's argument that an ethical society and effective political
culture could be sacred without being religious. Partly as a result, Ataturk banned
religion from both government and politics, just as he banned irregular verbs and Roman
numerals from everyday discourse. For the most part, the reforms have remained. Although
there have been several instances in which the military has stepped in to preserve
secularity, it is characteristic of Turkey that even some members of the Islamic Refah
("Welfare") Party describe it as "fundamentalism-lite." However,
Muslim political interests have begun to mobilize, and after winning a plurality of more
than 20 percent in the 1996 election, Refah is now sharing power with the previously
dominant "True Path" Party.

China also qualifies as a doubly secular case, again partly on the basis
of an imported Western ideology - in this case, of course, Marxist socialism. Actually,
the regime's opposition to religion has softened of late, and there is even waggish talk
of a "Third Opium War," in this case an intra-party dispute concerning whether
Marx was correct in dismissing religion as the "opiate of the masses." Of
course, there are many respects in which Marxism itself resembles a religion, including
its recent secularization. Indeed, one of the reasons why some Chinese leaders are more
accepting of traditional Christian, Buddhist, and Islamic religious communities (as long
as they operate on the state's own terms) is a much-lamented void at the core of Chinese
society where only money has currency. While some would argue that this is a cue for the
reintroduction of Confucianism, this is less preferable than imported faiths because party
cadres see it as a feudal and anti-revolutionary anachronism, despite its considerable
informal persistence. This is a time of transition in China, but not one that threatens a
serious religionizing of either the state or politics in familiar terms.

Clearly, the combination of a secular state and secular politics has
some empirical standing, and it is in some measure correctly associated with Western
post-Enlightenment developments. But this does not mean that all cases are confined to the
West, or that religion is entirely absent in any instance. Indeed, the combination in pure
form runs the risk of cultural lassitude, if not sterility. Many of the above cases reveal
persisting strains toward some form of religious or "sacred" alternative that
must often be officially, if not coercively, dampened. While these pressures rarely
operate as major trends in their own right, they are also seldom dismissable as idle
epiphenomena.

So far, then, we have dealt with the two opposing polar combinations:
the doubly religious associated with violence and the doubly secular tending toward
vacuity. Of course, there are many anomalies within each. But the most instructive
disjunctions involve the two combinations off the main diagonal. In most typologies these
bear the most succulent fruit of the conceptual labor.

Religious States and Secular Politics

There are basically three scenarios for the combination of a religious
state and secular politics. The first involves instances in which the religiousness of the
state is an empty symbol rather than a compelling commitment - more a case of
anachronistic form than contemporary function. In fact, I noted several such countries
under the secular-secular rubric. Lutheran Sweden is a case in point. While the state is
formally religious, it actually reflects a culture and a political scene that is highly
secular; the occasional religious movements and issues which compel attention are very
much the exception.

If this first model suggests a certain ritualized indifference to
religion, a second version involves a far more active and pointed religious presence.
Here, religion is an important source of state legitimacy, and no alternative religious
views are tolerated. Religion is banned from politics precisely because it is potentially
so upsetting as an emotionally charged component of the culture at large. Often politics
of any real substance is frowned upon, and religious grievances against the state are
suppressed along with all others. Here are the true theocracies represented by some
traditionally Catholic Latin American states as well as a number of Islamic hegemonies in
the Middle East, including Pakistan at various points in its history. It also applies to
several countries in South East Asia such as Buddhist Thailand. Here the state controls
the political world very tightly and embraces religion more to control it than to submit
to it.

In some ways these first two models of religious states with secular
politics are opposites of each other. The first represents religious tokenism in the midst
of apathy, while the second reveals a religious order imposed to quell potential religious
disorder, Meanwhile, a third qualifies as a perverse variant of the second: states that
carefully construct their own religion to frustrate the political mobilization of a
genuine religious alternative.

Indonesia offers a case in point. Here the state has used
"pancasila" as an imposed civil religion seeking to bind syncretically the
loyalties of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and animists - not to mention the 90 percent
of the population who are formally Muslims. Strict electoral rules make it virtually
impossible for any one religious group to rise up against the regime, and the state's
administrative apparatus ("golkar") also functions as a controlling political
structure. In all of this, the object is to stifle the development of the so-called
"Islamic fundamentalists," some of whose actual agendas are more secular than
religious.

Thus, the combination of a religious state with secular politics
produces strange partnerships. All three of its model scenarios are somewhat procrustean,
and the latter two share a sense of unstable vulnerability as a sort of way station for
cases caught in transition between the other three basic combinations.

Secular States and Religious Politics
At first blush, this seems another strained and uneasy combination with
squirming inclusions. After all, if a society is able to sustain a government that is
basically secular, isn't this because there is too little religious action to animate its
politics significantly? Put oppositely, when any society's politics become religiously
infected, how can its state structures be sufficiently inoculated to resist the virus?

There is merit in both these queries; yet the logic behind a secularly
neutral state with a free-ranging religious polity is that each complements and constrains
the other. There need be no limits to the free exercise of religion in politics as long as
there is a strict prohibition of any religious establishment within the state.
Politicians, as politicians, may campaign on - and even vote - their religious
consciences; nor is there anything to prevent them from bowing to the bidding of their
religious organizations. But state officials and state administrations have a different
responsibility. They must remain formally and functionally neutral, and not only in the
pluralistic fray between religions but also in the larger struggle between religion, on
the one hand, and secularism, on the other. The overall result should be a necessarily
contested but vital politics framed by an equitable state that rises above the fray to
guarantee fairness to all.

This at least describes the constitutional theory and founding
enthusiasm behind two countries that constitute the world's largest and oldest democracies
respectively; namely, India and the United States. When India obtained independence in
1947, it took three years to develop a constitution. The result reflected a number of
Western models, including the U.S. itself. But while the Indian form of government enjoyed
a successful run of almost thirty years with its stability and legitimacy intact, this
began to unravel in the 1980s.

A growing complaint within India today is that its Independence leaders
were too quick to apply Western secular forms of government to an Eastern cultural reality
that required a unique state response. The argument as articulated by such leading
intellectuals as T. N. Madan and Ashish Nandy holds that a secular state may work well
enough in a country like the U.S., but it is discordant within an Indian society that
remains intransigently nonsecular at its core. Indeed, the very imposition of Western
secularism has served perversely to fan the flames of religious politics by forcing
religious advocates to adopt increasingly more extreme measures to make their case -
measures that even include communal violence. Some go so far as to suggest that India is
not just a deeply religious country but a basically Hindu society that can only be led by
a Hindu government. As Hinduism finds its natural expression in state control, it will
revert back to its natural historical tolerance of the minority religions in its domain.

And yet this is only one reading of the Indian case. By no means all
Indian intellectuals have thrown in the secular towel. Scholars such as Andre Beteille,
Dipankar Gupta, and T. K. Oooman continue to defend an areligious rather than
anti-religious reading of the Indian constitution. From this perspective, the cause of
communal violence is not that the state is too secular but rather that it is not secular
enough, not that the state should use its influence to curb or end religion, but rather
that the state should be neutral among contesting religious groups and concerning the
larger question of religion versus nonreligion as a cultural desideratum. Alas, from the
very beginning, the Indian constitution included controversial religious allowances such
as a state exemption for Muslim personal law; it also mandated liberal religious reforms
within Hinduism concerning such matters as temple administration and a continuation of the
British "reservations policy" designed to provide a form of occupational
affirmative action for Hindu "untouchables."

These exceptions in secular state policy have festered and exacerbated
over the years. From a neutral vantage point, religious personal obligations are fine as
long as they do not contradict the minimal (not maximal) rights and responsibilities of
the citizenry at large. Rather than use religious status as a basis for reserving jobs,
some argue that this should be based on more general socio-economic disadvantagement (and
with an educational rather than occupational compensation).

In any event, it is clear that India's recently increasing
"communal violence" (Hindus vs. Muslims in Ayodyah, Bombay, and Kashmir; Sikhs
vs. Hindus in the Punjab; Tamil rebels in the South) reflects the tendency for state
leaders and state structures to become embroiled in religious conflicts. As concessions
made to one group require concessions made to its rival, constructing state policy has
come to resemble shortening a chair one leg at a time: the results are never quite even,
and the seat of power becomes increasingly unstable. The assassinations of both Indira and
Rajiv Gandhi offer tragic reminders of the possible consequences.

But in a strange way, one's reading of India depends upon one's reading
of the United States, and here too there are opposing options. On the one hand, the U.S.
has also been construed as among the most religious nations in the world. It ranks high in
virtually every measure of religiosity, with some 95 percent of Americans claiming a
"belief in God," and more than 40 percent claiming to attend religious services
on any given Sunday. And amongst the profusion of active religious movements, today one
hears a good deal about America's "culture wars" as storm clouds gather on the
religious right.

On the other hand, the U.S. can be portrayed as the secular nation par
excellence, especially given its widely heralded "separation of church and
state." This image has provoked both positive and negative assessments, the latter
including Richard Neuhaus's critique of the "naked public square" (1984) and
Stephen Carter's more recent concern over a "culture of disbelief" (1992). James
Hunter's portrayal of hostility between "orthodox and progressive" religious
forces (1991) can be seen as illustrating a democracy at work rather the kind of culture
wars that are tragically waged elsewhere (cf. Demerath, 1991). And as for those high
estimates of religious belief and participation - both have come under close recent
scrutiny. For example, Hadaway, Marler and Chaves (1993) have shown that actual religious
attendance is probably less than half of what is claimed. If Asians tend to minimize their
involvement in religion, Americans tend to maximize theirs. It is not hard to produce
corrected estimates that are quite similar for both.

As Demerath and Williams have argued (1992), however, these two images
of the United States are not as contradictory as one might suppose. Like the earlier
account of a secular state and a religious polity, they are contingently compatible in the
sense that each depends upon the other. Thus, we can have highly vocal and widely
mobilized religious politics precisely because there is a separation of church and state
where the actual affairs of government are concerned. At the same time, that same
separation would be intolerable if there were not ample opportunity elsewhere in the
society to exercise and express one's religious preference - or lack of one.

Overall, the United States may be the exception that commends the rule
concerning the virtues of a secular state and a religious polity. It would be naive and
unseemly to assume that the same combination would work identically for all other nations.
Nor is India the only cautionary case. In Egypt (as in neighboring Algeria), the nation as
a whole seems a battleground between a coercive and antireligious (as opposed to neutral)
state "secularism," on the one hand, and a small group of religious extremists
(led by the Islamic Group and other legatees of the Muslim Brotherhood). The scenario is
not uncommon and has surfaced in a variety of other states that are unsuccessful in their
efforts to suppress religious opposition - e.g., as previously described, Indonesia,
Turkey, and Thailand. Of course, a variety of factors are involved, and
"democracy" itself is not always a panacea or even always interpreted the same
way. Thus, democratic elections are one thing, but a democratic state is often quite
another. In addition to regimes that constrain electoral democracy to uphold a nominally
democratic state governance, there are certainly opposition movements that see electoral
democracy as merely a stage in the ultimate suspension of democratic governance in the
name of religion itself. The choices are not easy.

Meanwhile, post-1989 Poland also qualifies as a secular state with
religious politics. Although one might suppose it to be doubly Catholic as a reflection of
both its dominant cultural religious alignment and the oft-chronicled role of the church
on the Solidarity side of the recent revolution, this has already begun to shift. Many
Poles are more cultural than religious Catholics, and the old patterns of opposition to
ecclesiastical authority are resurfacing, especially as the church pressured the new
government to outlaw divorce and abortion. The response is especially apparent in the 1995
defeat of Lech Walesa by a crypto-communist but authentic secularist - a defeat that may
have occurred because of (rather than in spite of) the intercession of Cardinal Glimp and
Catholic officialdom on Walesa's behalf. And just recently, the government enacted a
liberalization of the church-backed abortion prohibition of 1993. In sum, while Poland
currently illustrates the combination of a secular state with religious politics, it may
soon join its European sisters to the West in the doubly secular category as its politics
lose their religious flavor.

Locating Japan

Finally, there is one country that offers an instructive case in flux.
To this point, we have not even mentioned Japan, one of the most important, dynamic, and
currently conflicted countries in the world. This is partly because Japan is a country
where we are still very far from being experts, though we have learned a great deal from
many Japanese scholars and such U.S. mentors and sources as Winston Davis (1992), Helen
Hardacre (1989), Daniel Metraux (1996), James W. White (1970). It is also because Japan's
position within our four types or categories is a matter of some doubt. In fact, at
various times in its recent history, Japan has qualified for placement in all four
combinations. While this is also true of many other countries - including some we have
already categorized simplistically - it is worth pausing to note how the four types occur
within the Japanese experience.

First, one reading of the almost 250 year, pre-1868 "Tokugawa"
period in Japanese history is that it combined a religious government (or shogunate) with
religious politics in the jousting among various Buddhist, Shinto, and even Christian
movements. Second, it is at least arguable that the 1868 "Meiji restoration"
ultimately produced a combination of a religious state and secular politics as a small
elite self-consciously fashioned a new state religion out of traditional folk Shinto. The
resulting State Shinto was used to define the government and to mobilize both
industrialization and militarism. Opposing religious voices were stilled, at least during
the war years, as the imprisoned leaders of such dissident groups as the lay Buddhist,
Soka Gakkai, attest. Third, at least for the first three decades following the war and the
adoption of a new constitution, the situation was more that of a secular state with
secular politics. Not only was State Shinto disestablished but there was relatively little
religious presence in the world of politics.

Fourth and most recently, the combination of religious politics and
secular state has begun to surface, however imperfectly. Formally, of course, the state
continues to be secular. Although some might argue that the Ministry of Education's 1989
requirement of the singing of the national anthem ("kimigayo") at public school
graduation ceremonies and the retention of some aspects of Shinto mythology in the school
curriculum marks a first step down a slippery slope toward a religious state, there
remains some doubt in the courts whether Shinto itself qualifies as religious. Similar
ambiguity surrounds the Cabinet member visits to the Yasukuni shrine honoring the war dead
that began in the mid-1980s. And yet conservative politicians are increasing persuaded
that some kind of sacred revitalization is necessary to fill the void at the nation's
cultural core where a devotion to industrial capitalism and a "yen for the yen"
does not suffice.

Meanwhile, religious politics of a quite different sort are involved in the increasingly
conspicuous role of new religious movements over the last decade. An especially pivotal
event was the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the cult, Aum Shinrikyo. The
resulting trial of the leader, Asahara, has turned out to be a siege for many marginal
religious movements who feel stigmatized by the same stereotypes and sanctions applied to
the Aum. This is especially true of the growing Soka Gakkai, whose membership has been
reckoned one-sixth of the population but whose seventy-year history has been consistently
controversial because of its zealous proselytizing and its formation of the only religious
political party in Japan which is now the country's largest opposition party. It is true
that Komeito (or the CGP, "Clean Government Party") has not been legally linked
to the Soka Gakkai since 1970, and it has recently merged with the "New
Frontier" Party. And yet there are sufficient perceived affinities remaining between
Komeito and the Soka Gakkai so that discrediting one tends to discredit the other.

This is at least one plausible motivation behind the dominant (and
generally conservative) "Liberal Democratic Party's" recently successful
Religious Corporation Law. The result here is partly political in applying the same brush
that tars the Aum Shinrikyo to the Soka Gakkai and then Komeito in turn. But it also marks
a potential sea change in state policy toward religious groups generally, especially those
that are somewhat off center. The introduction of tighter reporting requirements, greater
monitoring vigilance, and vague new standards of religious propriety licences the
government to fish in deeper waters for its opposition prey. This might seem consistent
with a secular state in the antireligious sense of the phrase. But it is an alarming
departure from a secular state that is neutral concerning both religion in general and
religions in particular. It is precisely this connotation of a neutral secularity that
best avoids a "religious establishment" while promoting the "free
exercise" of religion. Of course, we would argue that this same combination is
optimal in the long run not just for religion but for society as a whole.

So much for a cross-cultural reconnoitering of the various relations
that exist between religion, politics, and the state. Any exercise that presumed to freeze
and fit whole societies within a single simple conceptual grid would, of course, be a
fool`s errand. At the same time, it is sometimes useful to gain a sense of the various
combinations and tendencies that exist today as a guide to tomorrow - especially since
there is no more volatile intersection or one with greater consequences than the one at
issue.

Of the four combinations we have examined, that of a religious state
combined with religious politics is certainly the most potentially violent. Unfortunately,
it is also a direction in which many societies are being pressed. By contrast, the doubly
secular combination may provide political stability at the price of cultural vacuity. The
conjunction of a religious state with secular politics can be either a symbolic
anachronism or the result of an imposed religious orthodoxy that relies heavily on
coercion and tolerates no opposition.

While the coupling of a secular state with religious politics is
currently rare, it is arguably the most promising type for promoting both cultural
vitality and structural stability. In the final analysis, no country need be dominated
either by a vacuous and ahistorical secularism or a raging religious current that sweeps
all else before it.

Let us end with a more personal postscript. Anyone engaged in
comparative research learns early and often to take refuge in the phrase, "all else
being equal." In addition, any American engaged in global analysis and prescription
must be especially sensitive to our long tradition of triumphal "exceptionalism"
(cf. Lipset, 1996). One of the problems of comparative work concerns the dilemma of
dissimulating one's own values and one's best sense of what might work for others.
Certainly Edward Said (1978) has alerted all Western scholars to the dangers of
Orientalism and has made the term a byword for cross-cultural stereotyping. However, as
James Carrier's collection on Occidentalism implies (1996), distorted perceptions and
communications occur in both directions and are endemic in any situation in which power
imbalances are compounded by cultural differences.

The problem is exacerbated when one seeks not just to understand but to
prescribe. But even here there are two possible errors. The first is to blunder ahead and
prescribe one's own medicine for every patient, regardless of the ailments and host
conditions; the second is to pull back into a benighted relativism that treats every
society as only analyzable in its own terms and only changeable in its own fashion. The
latter is especially problematic when it is merely a pose - what Charles Taylor has
referred to as the "obligatory hypocrisy" and false cultural respect of today's
"multicultural" world.

India again offers a pertinent example, as we can see in Donald Smith's
magisterial volume India as a Secular State (1963). The definitive work on the
then new constitution, the book concludes by noting some of the evidences of the religious
nose in the constitutional tent cited. But the author goes on to express full confidence
that India in its wisdom will work its way through or around them. One can only wonder
whether that confidence was any more genuine then than it might be now. If, as Durkheim
once suggested, comparative sociology is the only sociology, then a sharing of comparative
assessments must be encouraged rather than censored. Both social analysis and social
policy depend upon candid cross-cultural exchange.

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for the use of the individual user.Source: Cross Currents, Spring 1997, Vol. 47 Issue 1.